Tesla's Ambient Heat Engine Theory - Right or Wrong ?

[memoryman]

here is the video I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBp_SPJAOJc
Note that he is collecting charge - not heat.
A heat pump TRANSFERS heat; it does not generate it. Energy has to be supplied for the transfer. That transferred heat is available to do work.

[lightend]

Got to page 2. Thought I would just chip in. will keep reading but wanted to suggest a couple of things.
Ambient temps drop at night.
this sterling type motor heats up the cold box.

(see awesome art work attached)
If we can do it with just a couple of degrees, how about this?
Why not have the 'cold box' cold during the day, as the box warms up due to heat being exchanged it will become ambient, around this time the sun goes down and the outside air plummets, now the box hows the heat and exchanges with the cooler outside temperature, running the thing in reverse.


second thought, is its just a couple of degrees,
why not have the hot sink in ambient temps but have a cold sink underground spread about in the soil where it can dissipate any heat fairly easily.

sorry if I jumped the gun here, just intrigued by this and the prospect of possibly using low heat nitinol.

[dieter]

The drinking bird is actually a good example for a demonstrated 2nd law breakdown.

Open system or not, is splitting hairs.

Tesla mentioned a similar idea, in which a liquid substance with a boiling point at ambient temperature is used, instead of water as in a steam engine. Wether boiling or just expanding, like eg. carbo-hydroxides such as eg. gasoline, which are performing high volume chanches under small temperature diffrences. It certainly is possible to convert thermal environment energy into mechanical force. Cooling can always be achieved by evaporation. And where there is cooling, there's a temperature diffrence and hence an opportunity for a heat engine.

[pomodoro]

The drinking bird is actually a good example for a demonstrated 2nd law breakdown.

Unfortunately , it may look like it is but isn't actually braking the 2nd law at all. The increase in entropy from the water going into vapor is enough to offset the heat required from the system, so the water cools down. Pretty funky still.

[dieter]

I consider the atmosphere with the energy of the sun as a closed system in equilibrium.

See water evaporation as the same as microscopic turbulences, such as brownian motion.

And in Maxwells demon, brownian motion is allowed. At least as long as it cannot / does not have to think ^^

Ok, maybe you say  now then combustion of fuel would be the same. Maybe it is, for me the only point is: it must be clean and freely available.

But ok, I probably miss the point here.